Trial & Error with RedHat 6.0

[Richard Royston]

Christoph Doerbeck wrote

> ... but unfortunately if you look
> around at vender supported products like Legato (backups) and 
> TNG (monitoring), they have declared support for RedHat (5.2).
> Look at Dell, Compaq, IBM, etc... it's all stamped with 'RedHat Inside'

and Glenn Burkhardt wrote

> More likely than not, all of these products will run on Debian....

It seems to me that if Glenn is right, and I believe he is, we should be doing 
some "Open Source" education/conversion, trying to explain to application 
package vendors that linux distributions are infinitely more homogeneous than 
different versions of Unix, and we don't have the Open Look/Motif split 
either. It seems likely that the only significant difference between the 
distributions will be between the desktops and/or the package managers. When I 
installed 'applix' on my system I believe it was, in any case, independent of 
both these factors; I'm virtually certain it didn't use RPM, or if it did, it 
was in a relatively superficial way, and it only depended on XFree86 - if I 
wanted to do something with my desktop I was free to do it myself. Any 
applications packaged that way should run equally well on any distribution.

If some companies wanted to cover more platforms, and didn't have a vested 
interest in maximizing Red Hat's income at the expense of other distributions, 
it should be easy enough to include installation procedures/scripts for 
several distributions at almost no extra effort. If, in the course of your 
investigations, you were to try to install any of these packages on other 
distributions, like Debian, and succeeded without having to put much effort 
into it, you might mention it to the application vendors and persuade them to 
modify their spiels somewhat.

I think the free software community (and the open source community?) have a 
vested interest in making sure that the playing field for linux distributions 
remains as level as possible. I certainly don't want to have to confront a 
situation where Red Hat becomes the only viable supplier. For what it's worth, 
my impression is that Red Hat's support isn't superior to other 
distributions', and may be inferior to some. Red Hat has done enough things 
people don't like that we shouldn't stand by while they (or others for them) 
lay claim to things that aren't really so.
-- 
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Richard J. Royston                             68 Baldwin Street
richard at aoi.ultranet.com                       Apartment 22
(617) 242-5280                                 Charlestown, MA 02129


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